"Umepotea," I said to my friend when she came to pick up her children after trusting me to babysit them. "Work has been... a lot," she replied. She looked tired, she sounded it too.Apparently a colleague had missed a deadline, so she stepped in. Last week another project had gone off track, so it landed on her desk. A client needed reassurance. Then a new initiative had been handed to her because management knew she would "get it done."
As she spoke, it became clear that none of these responsibilities officially belonged to her. Yet, by every conventional measure, she was succeeding. New opportunities kept coming her way. Her managers trusted her. Her reputation was growing and she had become the person everyone relied on.
Listening to her, I found myself wondering whether success has a hidden cost we don't talk about enough. We celebrate competence as though it is an endless resource, never asking what happens when the reward for doing good work is simply... more work.
Perhaps the greatest career trap is becoming so dependable that everyone else's problems quietly become yours. I had watched tiktoks about this phenomenon, it’s called “the competence trap.”
Competent people earn trust quickly, receive bigger responsibilities and are often the first to be considered for important assignments, but competence can also make it difficult to stop becoming everyone's first phone call when something goes wrong.
